Leaving Long Lasting Legacy: BTC and the UN’s Transcript

Rotarians from District 7070 have been working for many years in partnership with Ronnie Yimsut, a Killing Fields survivor, to build a school. At age 15, Ronnie was the only person to survive a Killing Fields Massacre. Ronnie has created a vocational school, the Bakong Technical College, just outside of Siem Reap (the location of Angkor Wat) to train and provide local young people with necessary skills to assist them to earn a living and thus establishing a much better life. There are now 104 students (our goal is 300 students) being taught languages, computers; with business management, bike and small engine repair, culinary arts training and training for the hospitality business, which shall follow when operation funds become available.

7 [11.52.12]
8 In seeking to apply the sanctions of the law to these three men
9 we do not dispute that states and individuals outside Cambodia
10 contributed to what took place here, both before and during those
11 fateful years of 1975 to 1979. But that does not exonerate these
12 three accused before you. It is not a defence for what they did.
13 Just east of Siem Reap Town in Rulous commune of Prasat Bakong
14 District, a new institution of higher learning is rising from the
15 mud on the shores of the Great Lake. Classrooms, dormitories, a
16 meeting hall, library, computer centre are all under construction
17 and will soon give poor children in Siem Reap the education they
18 need, affording them the opportunities that we all deserve as
19 human beings.
20 This place, Bakong Technical College, is the vision of a man
21 named Ranachith Yimsut – Ronnie to many of his friends. Yimsut
22 has a particular attachment to Siem Reap. On the 31st of December
23 1977, his entire extended family, men, women, children,
24 grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, was among a group of 79
25 new people who were herded to the shore of the Great Lake by CPK

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1 cadres and clubbed to death in a muddy ditch in one of the
2 countless massacres during the DK Regime.
3 Yimsut was the only survivor of that massacre. And today on those
4 same shores he’s building what will be a university, a place of
5 learning, something decent and honourable and lasting. Between
6 1.7 million and 2.2 million human beings died premature deaths in
7 the three years, eight months and 20 days that these three
8 accused ruled Cambodia.
9 [11.55.06]
10 The magnitude of lost human spirit, talent, and potential,
11 scholars, doctors, builders, surgeons, teachers, men and women of
12 commerce, religious and civic leaders, this endless role of the
13 dead. How many schools, universities, and hospitals are unbuilt?
14 How many lives have not been saved? How many children not
15 educated? How much has been lost?
16 It does not escape the sight of anyone who lives in this country
17 how it still struggles today. And why? Because the accused who
18 are before you are thieves of time and common murderers of an
19 entire generation of Cambodians.
20 [11.56.03]
21 They robbed decades of development and prosperity from this
22 country. They left gaping holes in every Cambodian family. They
23 removed all breath from notions such as law and civilized
24 behaviour. No one in this country is left unhurt or unaffected by
25 what these three elderly men have done.

00756131 E1/14.1
Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
Trial Chamber – Hearing
Case No. 002/19-09-2007-ECCC/TC
22/11/2011
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I wrote this in support of BTC USA, Inc.

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About BTC

Bakong Technical College (BTC) is an experienced NGO with the backing and support of many passionate and extraordinary people. We also have a direct and vested interest in various economically depressed local communities. We have a number of socially conscious projects already in place, designed to improve the economic health and well being of a limited number of rural communities.